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Why data does not have value - people do

Companies today have access to more data than ever before but converting that data into value remains one of the top priorities and challenges for most marketing teams.

The world of marketing revolves around reaching and engaging your target consumer with relevant content that influences a positive response be it liking a post, making an enquiry or buying a product.

Marketing is all about people, and it’s by attracting the right people to your brand that you generate value. As such, data doesn’t have a true value on its own – but customers do.

Without data, there is no insight, but without customers, there is no business.

Data is, however, an essential tool, to generate insight about customers and identify commercial opportunities. An organisation which uses evidence to drive decisions will generally outperform those that don’t.

The key to success in generating value is in the design of the business activity intended to influence customers. Actions can take many forms such as new product launches, operational changes and creative solutions, but if they are poorly executed, with no consumer insight to drive their design, they are likely to fail.

So what, in its simplest form, is the most important role of the Marketing function? We believe it’s to understand who the good customers are and design strategies to get more of them. Valuable by-products of an optimal audience acquisition strategy are to enhance the loyalty of the customer base and reduce the levels of not so good customers.

Simple right? Not at all!

The value of customers is not easy to understand nor is the definition of a ‘good’ one. The customer database often doesn’t contain the necessary insight to help marketing initiatives to successfully attract more of the same.

We could go out and source all the data we want via data brokers and consumer research, to define our priority audience and feed our creative planning. But, bringing all the relevant data together in a central place and analysing it is a costly technical exercise. It would also take forever and time is of the essence as we have targets to reach!

At Merkle, we have been working to simplify this challenge, to help improve the speed at which you can achieve rich consumer insights to generate improved media ROI. Last month we launched Datasource, the most comprehensive source of consumer identity and insight in the UK.

With GDPR, Data Protection and contract standards at its core, DataSource brings together millions of data points to give marketing teams an unrivalled view of consumers and behaviours. We have created the UK’s largest platform of all-channel consumer identifying information, and we work with our clients to provide better business outcomes.

With the launch of DataSource, Merkle Aquila can deliver rich audience insights and our world-class enterprise analytics platform, Discovery in a single offering. By having the right data available in the right place we can quickly understand the customers you already have and the ones you don’t, and then help you to connect with them.

Your business’ USPs are the backbone of your messaging because they tell your target audience exactly why your product or service is different to others, and why they won’t find a company like yours elsewhere